Franco Maresco's biopic about his travails making a film about late threatre great Carnelo Bene, Un film fatto per Bene, is a "grotesque film for a cinema that is now dead," the director said at the presentation of the last of Italy's five entries for the Golden Lion in Venice Friday.
He said the film about celebrating actor and director Bene, who died aged 64 in 2002, is "both a self-deprecating and never celebratory biopic of the director himself, and a grotesque, ramshackle, and melancholic exploration of reality." The film hammers home some points for the Palermo-born filmmaker, "first off, cinema is dead"; then, it highlights his obsessions (obsessive-compulsive disorder exorcised by writing numbers on walls); then, it displays a blatant disdain for Italian cinema; and, finally, it highlights his chronic inability to finish a film.
Producer Andrea Occhipinti, who like the other protagonists plays himself in the film, is well aware of this, the main "victim" of Maresco's inability to say at a certain point: "No, that's enough, the film ends here!" The story of this work, in fact, tells us how filming on the film about Carmelo Bene was abruptly interrupted after yet another on-set accident.
